Qualcomm Buys RISC-V Chip Designer

Qualcomm has purchased, Ventana, a RISC-V chip design firm aimed at the datacenter-class processor market.

Ventana holds 48 patents on processor designs, leading to speculation that Qualcomm is interested in IPR defense as they strength their datacenter-class products.

Given Qualcomm’s ongoing legal battle with Arm Limited, this may also signal the company’s pivot away from an unencumbered CPU architecture.

System76 Ships the COSMIC Desktop

System76 has signaled that the COSMIC Desktop has now reached its first stable version, dubbed the COSMIC Desktop Environment Epoch 1, with its inclusion in Pop_OS! 24.04 LTS.

System76 notes that development of the COSMIC Desktop was funded entirely through sales of System76 hardware.

COSMIC is also written in #Rust, giving certain reactionary segments of the tech community another reason to shake their fists at the sky.

GrapheneOS Exiled From France

The GrapheneOS project has announced that they have moved all their server infrastructure (e.g. Mastodon, Matrix) out of France for fear of government prosecution, and that developers for the project should no longer travel to France to avoid arrest. This comes as a reaction to the French interpretation of the European Union Chat Control

#grapheneos #france

Massive NPM Worm Attack

GitLab has discovered an NPM worm that is impacting a massive number of Git repositories and npm projects, ex-filtrating sensitive data such as cloud API keys and other security credentials.

According to Wiz, the scope of the attack is massive:

• 27% of code and cloud environments
• 700 npm packages
• 25,000 git repositories
• 500 GitHub users
• 775 compromised GitHub access tokens
• 373 AWS credentials
• 300 GCP credentials
• 115 Azure credentials

#npm #javascript #git

BentoPDF

The release notes for BentoPDF v1.7.4 contain trojan horse API keys to the OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini platforms that link to a RickRoll.

The ZBT-2

Home Assistant has released the Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2, the successor to the ZBT-1. The ZBT-2 has a USB adapter and a precisely tuned antenna for connecting Zigbee, Thread, or Matter networks to Home Assistant. It is available immediately at a cost for $49.